Categories:

I was just on a panel with Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. We've been talking the last few days about communities and it turns out the #wikipedia IRC channel is about the same size as #joiito. (approx 100 people online. Wikipedia has many other sub channels though so in aggregate they are much bigger...) Anyway, Jimmy noticed that I didn't have a Wikipedia article and he decided to go to his community and see if he could get an article written while we were on the channel.

#wikipedia

-- Jimbo has joined #wikipedia
Jimbo: Just a fun experiment...
Jimbo: Joichi Ito is here at this conference, on the same panel with me.
Jimbo: But we apparently have no article about him.
Jimbo: A challenge: in the next hour, how good of an article can we create?
Member1: '''Joichi Ito''' is a [[person]]. {{bio-stub}}
Jimbo: Yes, he uses wikipedia too. But he's famous and important and we need a bio.
Jimbo: I have to go, because our panel is about to start again...
Jimob: But please, remind people as they wander in here, and let's see what happens.
Member2: who the fuck is Joichi Ito
Member3: Member2: write an article and find out
Member2: Jimbo can write the article if it's so important
Member3: someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed today
Member1: The easy way out would be to grab an article from another page, cross out the name and write 'Joichi Ito' over it in crayon

It's the same on my channel, but leadership/foundership has nothing to do with authority. In fact, trying to exercise authority often has exactly the opposite effect. The article did end up getting written though. ;-)

1 Comment

I remember looking for Joi's bio on Wikipedia, and being disappointed at not finding one. That was about a week and a half ago. I wonder how much wikipedia is referenced, compared to users who edit it?

Leave a comment

Name

Email

URL

Remember personal info?

Comments (You may use HTML tags for style)

By submitting your comments you agree to license them to the public under the terms of the
CC BY 4.0 license.